Andy Stallings

Art: The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch

Paradise

Frank as the curve of yourspine on the pumice stonestrewn beach, arched andsignaling cross. Is it obviouswhere assessment and easeblur in a body, behold. Flipthe edges of the novel’s pagestenderly all afterlife, butnever read. Beyond theimpulse to be and to haveand have not, deliciously. Amotor’s hum underneath anylocation where cooler airmeets high arid pines in thelift of summer’s salutation.What hasn’t yet disrupts. Atrail of floating plastic behindthe departing speed boat,upright and riding a listingoffshore wind.

Paradise

Tarpon and drum decayinginto the thickening lip of abeach lined with volunteerpines. Needles elsewhereshower a wood where thechild was roughly conceivedand roughly abandoned. Bynarrative law, thereafter aking, though unhappy. Morecommonly, the child findsherself lost in an urbanlabyrinth which provesto have been her ownneighborhood when lookedat right, though too late, byher brother or her aunt. Thisis the tale of a face which Iloved and which buried itselfin daydream. A bower ofbeach grass blown againstthe storm fence. But the birdof that bower’s anotherballad’s loss.

Paradise

Does desire turn to affection,and at what cost. A distanthalo on the hills at dawn.Dirt rings on the table, coffeespots on the manuscript. Onan island strewn withvolcanic rock, there can beno one path between points,and this is cast as a virtue ofplace. In one version, heknew the names of flowers,rocks, and shells. Intimategenerations. An arrangementof voices. I can’t rememberwhat it’s like, she says.

Paradise

The afternoon heat hadseeped from the river, therocks, the hemlock woods,where our children weren’tmorals for tales, but actualslipping, sobbing, bleedingbodies now sleeping, so, wesat on swings with our kneesdrawn up and barely talked,to feel the specific gratitudeof a gusting breeze or amosquito piercing the distant,delicate skin. Once, therewere planets apparently nearcollision, and elsewhere,nebulae billowed gas,burning off spent star cores.We had felt the heat so thick,it seemed the water in itwanted pushing asideto make way for a handextending. Not to ignore howwe cover our bodies whilesleeping, as though to protectthe skin from what seeks it.As though light stops at thesurface, or at the core.Everything unfamiliar, it wasjust as well to act new. To actas though you knew you.

Andy Stallings lives in Deerfield, MA, where he teaches English and poetry at Deerfield Academy. He taught several years at Tulane University prior to that, and has published a book of poems, “To the Heart of the World,” with Rescue Press (2014). He has three small children, and coaches cross country running.